The record • In order
Every case, hearing, report, and release on this site,
in the order it happened — 1947 to 2026.
Filter by era, or click a node’s “filter the tracker” link to see that case in the solved-vs-unexplained table. Every date below is already on this site, with its official source — nothing here is new, only arranged.
Era
37 of 37 events shown
July 1947
A rancher finds debris on his land. The Army Air Forces first calls it a flying disc, then a weather balloon. Decades later the Air Force identifies the material as Project Mogul, a classified balloon program. The National Archives holds no Blue Book documentation on Roswell.
August 15, 1950
Nick Mariana films two bright objects for about 16 seconds on 16mm color film. Blue Book attributes it to F-94 jet reflections — disputed. The Condon Report leaves it unexplained.
August–September 1951
Professors watch formations of lights; freshman Carl Hart Jr. photographs a V-formation. Blue Book’s index files it as “Other (BIRDS)”. The Air Force photo lab writes it can neither confirm nor deny the negatives’ authenticity.
July 2, 1952
Navy warrant officer Delbert Newhouse films a formation of bright objects. The Air Force photo lab rates the film unidentified in February 1953; a June 1956 memo gives the firm verdict seagulls.
July 19–20 & 26–27, 1952
Radar returns over Washington on two weekends, seen on three airports’ scopes. Officially attributed to temperature inversion — announced by Gen. Samford at a press conference, July 29, 1952.
January 17, 1953
Five scientists, convened by the CIA, review the Air Force’s best UFO cases over four days. They find no evidence of a direct threat and no evidence of extraterrestrial craft — and recommend stripping UFOs of “the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”
February 16, 1953
Frederick C. Durant’s fuller record of the Robertson Panel’s meetings: the evidence presented, the recommendations, and the panel’s concern that a flood of UFO reports could clog air-defense channels during a real attack.
August 13–14, 1956
Radar and visual sightings at two RAF bases over two nights. The record card concludes “Anam. [sic] Propagation” — but adds it was “impossible to make a definite determination of the sources of these sightings.”
July 17, 1957
An RB-47 tracks an object for 700+ miles with airborne radar, ground radar, and visual sightings. Blue Book blames an airliner — American Airlines Flight 655. The Condon Report classifies it unknown: “The phenomenon remains unidentified.”
November 2–3, 1957
Witnesses across Levelland report a glowing egg-shaped object and cars stalling as it passes. The record card concludes “Ball lightning”. The field report was “forwarded as unresolved.”
April 24, 1964
Police officer Lonnie Zamora finds an egg-shaped object on legs in an arroyo, with burned brush and four rectangular depressions in the soil. The record card marks it “Unknown”: “Case carried as UNIDENTIFIED pending additional data.”
1968
The University of Colorado study, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, led by physicist Edward Condon. It concludes that further study of UFOs is unlikely to advance science. The Air Force cites it when it closes Blue Book the next year.
October 24, 1968
A B-52 crew, ground personnel, and radar track a bright object that descends toward the base. The record card gives “Possible (PLASMA)” for the radar sighting and “Probable (AIRCRAFT)(B-52)” for the ground sightings. The base’s own report lists four occurrences that “cannot be correlated or explained at this level.”
December 17, 1969
The Air Force terminates the program after 12,618 investigations — 701 left unidentified. The records, 94 rolls of microfilm, go to the National Archives, Record Group 341, open to the public.
December 1980
U.S. airmen at RAF Woodbridge report lights and a craft in the forest over two nights. Deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt records his account in a memorandum to the UK Ministry of Defence — the Halt memo, now in the National Archives.
May 19, 1986
Twenty-one objects tracked by Brazilian air defense radar over several states; fighter jets scrambled. The Brazilian Air Force’s COMDA report, dated June 2, 1986, is in the Arquivo Nacional.
March 13, 1997
Two events over Arizona in one night: a V-formation seen across the state, and a row of lights over the mountains south of Phoenix at about 10 p.m. The later lights were Maryland Air National Guard flares; no official explanation was ever given for the V-formation.
October 14, 2003
A massive luminous red square, about 100 yards to a side, hangs over missile defense sites for about 45 seconds — one of five UAP incidents at Vandenberg between 2003 and 2005, documented by former Air Force military policeman Jeffrey Nuccetelli.
November 14, 2004
Off San Diego, Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz intercept a smooth, white, Tic Tac-shaped object that mirrors their maneuvers and outruns them. The infrared video, filmed by Cmdr. David Fravor’s wingman, becomes the most famous UAP footage in the world.
April 27, 2020
The Department of Defense formally releases three UAP videos filmed by Navy pilots — FLIR1 (the Tic Tac), GIMBAL, and GOFAST — confirming they are authentic Navy recordings.
June 25, 2021
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports on 144 UAP incidents from U.S. government sources, 2004–2021. Eighty involved more than one sensor. Exactly one is identified with high confidence — a large, deflating balloon.
May 17, 2022
The House Intelligence Subcommittee holds the first open congressional hearing on UAP since the 1960s. Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray and Under Secretary of Defense Ronald Moultrie testify.
April 19, 2023
AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick briefs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on the office’s mission, activities, oversight, and budget.
July 26, 2023
David Grusch, David Fravor, and Ryan Graves testify before the House Oversight Committee — the hearing that puts UAP back on the front pages.
2023
An FBI FD-302 records a triangular object near Peterson Space Force Base and NORAD headquarters. The interview is declassified in PURSUE Release 05.
March 8, 2024
AARO’s Congressionally mandated review of eight decades of U.S. government UAP work, 1945–2023. Its finding: no evidence that any U.S. government investigation confirmed a sighting as extraterrestrial technology, and no evidence of a hidden reverse-engineering program.
November 13, 2024
The House Oversight Committee hears from Luis Elizondo, Michael Gold, Michael Shellenberger, and Tim Gallaudet — and from the Immaculate Constellation document, which describes itself as an unacknowledged special access program. The Department of Defense says it holds no record of any such program.
November 14, 2024
AARO and ODNI report 757 UAP reports received between May 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024 — 49 of them at or above 100 km altitude. Every case closed in the period resolved to an ordinary object.
September 9, 2025
The most recent public hearing: Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Dylan Borland, and others testify on UAP transparency and whistleblower protection.
May 8, 2026
The Department of War opens war.gov/ufo and publishes the first tranche of declassified UAP files under PURSUE: 158 files, including Apollo-era astronaut accounts and military infrared footage.
May 18, 2026
334 pages of historical UAP records, many formerly held at the Top Secret UMBRA level, released after a FOIA appeal by the Disclosure Foundation in a fight tracing to a 1980 lawsuit.
May 22, 2026
F-16 gun-camera footage of the February 2023 Lake Huron shootdown, and formation-flying UAPs recorded over the Persian Gulf in October 2019.
June 12, 2026
Four FBI eyewitness orb videos from the northeastern United States (2021–2025), plus CIA and NASA files.
August 7, 2026
The Gulf of Oman AC-130J gunship “cold orbs” encounter (2021); FBI witness interviews with paired renderings, including a 500-ft silent triangle over Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002.
September 18, 2026
The AAWSAP batch: the DIA contract file, 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, the 1952 Tremonton film, a 1952 Ruppelt audio briefing, and Colorado police reports.
October 23, 2026
An AARO memorandum and an FBI FD-302 on a 2026 triangle over a western U.S. site; nine more AAWSAP files; ten early Cold War Air Intelligence reports, 1952–1957. The latest release — and the reason this site exists.
Two famous cases are deliberately not on this timeline — Nash–Fortenberry (July 14, 1952) and the McMinnville photographs (May 11, 1950). Both are carried as unidentified, but their National Archives file units could not be verified from here, and this site does not list a case without a link to its original file.
Every case above is told in full on the cases page or the famous cases page. The counts behind them are on the tracker, the places on the case map, and the releases on the watcher.
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